Dealing With Work Stress as a Junior

When it comes to work, I believe the transition from education to junior employment is one of the hardest transitions to make. In this blog I want to describe why and hopefully make recommendations that help young people slot into the working world easier.

Working with New Complexity

Feeling out of your depth is a terrible feeling to have. It can cause strong imposter syndrome and drop work motivation levels. It's extremely difficult to transition from purely academic work to workplace activities without feeling the effects of this cliff. There are ways it can be overcome though. You don't have to begin by grappling with every fine detail of the project from day one - start small and ensure your seniors have developed a plan that can help you move from simple tasks to the more complex scenarios you'd need to deal with as part of your role. Pick up on as much context as you can, as this will help you piece together the cogs of processes that are complex in nature. Ask as many questions as possible, this is essential. Initially in my working life (especially virtually), I feared cutting into business discussions with questions asking for more explanation as I did not want to derail the meeting's progress. Trust me, you should ask the questions you need to ask since it will help you be more useful to your employers quicker. Do the legwork, rewatch meeting recordings and make notes that help you track the key outcomes of every meeting.

Help Your Employers Help You

Knowing your strengths is essential if you hope to tackle your weaknesses. In projects, work with your managers and mentors to ensure you start in areas you feel you will perform strongly in, while gaining slow exposure to the areas of work in which you anticipate struggle. Knowing your comfort zone and aiming to move out of it in slow increments helps you move into more difficult work in a controlled manner. In my view, being direct is also important part of making positive waves in your first job. Being passive and observing to understand is important, but making sure you make valuable input to progress project work (not just from a position of comfort) is equally as important. Be as transparent as possible when it comes to predicting what you can and can't deliver, this helps set expectations and ensures you do not get overstretched from week to week. Do your homework and aim to impress.

Set Virtual Boundaries

Working under pressure from a home office can cause undue stress since there's no actual "getting away" from work. Make sure you consciously log out when your to-do list and meetings are achieved - and set a daily time for a lunch or break during which you wouldn't take meetings. Don't overfill your day with meetings either. You need to balance time spent on conversations against time spent producing what you need to in order for targets to be achieved. You can achieve what you need to in the daily working time you have. If not, call out the strains on your capacity to ensure teammates and leads can carry the weight with you. I've found making an early start before project teams log in has helped me collect my thoughts and set a target list for the coming day. Enjoy the silence with a cup of coffee and settle any nerves so that you can work at the highest level possible.

Reflection is also the last piece of advice I'd offer on the subject. You can only move so far forward in 5 days, so looking at the successes of your work rather than just where you failed helps you look forward to the coming challenges. Making mistakes is natural, especially when you are starting out. Ensuring you learn from them is much more important to your development. Good luck.

Author: My name is Amer, I'm a Computer Science with Business graduate currently working in tech consulting. My thoughts in this blog are based on my opinions regarding how to transition from education to work, rather than concrete proposals based on research. Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn (on the about page) if you have any questions.